Roger Waters says he knows the moment Pink Floyd had begun to break down, and it came after they recorded one of their best albums.
The bassist and songwriter, who left Pink Floyd in 1985, believes the group had suffered from “fragmentation” from the mid-1970s onward. It means that for nearly a decade, Waters had worked with David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright, in a somewhat hostile manner. Speaking about the tensions felt between the band members, Waters noted that there was a team spirit within the group in their early years, but that it was lost the longer the band stuck together.
He said in 2011: “Yes. Up until The Dark Side Of The Moon, we were very motivated and worked well as a team. After Dark Side Of The Moon there was a long period of fragmentation.”
His comment on the tensions between the band members may not be a surprise to many Pink Floyd fans, though the group did at one point enjoy one another’s company. Waters would say in a separate interview that he regretted the way he left the band. Waters would leave the group two years after The Final Cut released.
Speaking of his departure from the band in 2007, Waters said: “I don’t think any of us came out of the years from 1985 with any credit, really. It was a bad, negative time, really. And I regret my part in that negativity.
“I was actually more attached to the philosophy and politics of Pink Floyd than the others were — certainly more so than David was. In a way, whatever I did I did in a way to protect the integrity of what I saw as being important about the work that the four of us did together.
“I realise now that move was doomed to failure … and why should I have imposed my feelings about the work and what it was worth on the others if they didn’t feel the same? I was wrong in attempting to do that.”
A chance to rectify those mistakes presented itself with the band’s Live 8 reunion, which Waters considers a chance to “let bygones be bygones” with his ex-bandmates. In interviews and performances to follow that 2005 performance, the relationship between Gilmour and Waters seemed to improve slightly.
He said of the Live 8 show: “It was just… really good. I was very moved to be on stage with Dave, Nick and Rick that night.
“I felt at ease and glad to be given the opportunity to let bygones be bygones and to demonstrate that, although we’ve had our difficulties in the past, we are grown men who understand that rapprochement is possible even in the face of differing points of view.
“It was really good to transcend all the crap and say, ‘Well, fuck it, let’s just get up onstage. It’s been a long while. We can agree to disagree about all the old stuff and stand up here and play these three of four songs and it can be fun, it can be good’.”
